TV Ratings: 'Thursday Night Football' Holds in NBC Launch

The Panthers-Saints game does not duplicate the boosted interest the NFL saw on Sunday.

NBC claimed its first Thursday victory in months thanks to a migrating Thursday Night Football. But the fourth night of NFL play did not get any kind of ratings rebound on the new network.

The Carolina Panthers' victory over the New Orleans Saints, which saw Panthers linebacker Luke Kuechly carted off the field following a dramatic knee injury, was steady with the last shared Thursday NFL outing between CBS and the league's cable network. NBC and the NFL Network shared an overnight 9.3 rating among metered market households. (That last game, on Oct 20, ultimately averaged 14.2 million viewers.)

Heading into this week, after a string of cable-only outings, Thursday Night Football had seen some of the steeper drops in NFL ratings for this fatigued season of play. The shared CBS-NFL Network run of Thursday Night Football was off 16 percent from the comparable dates of 2015, averaging around 14 million viewers.

The Big Bang Theory took a minor hit on CBS, averaging a 3.1 rating among adults 18-49. It will emerge as the No. 2 draw of the night in the key demo when time zone adjusted scores for football come in. The Great Indoors (1.5 adults) and Mom (1.4 adults) took minor dips as well, while Life in Pieces (1.4 adults) and Pure Genius (0.9 adults) held steady.

Elsewhere, ABC saw growth for How to Get Away With Murder. The drama's fall finale, which killed off a series regular, improved two-tenths of a point in the key demo to a 1.4 rating among adults 18-49. Grey's Anatomy, with its 2.1 rating in the key demo, was also up on ABC — while Notorious earned a steady 0.9 rating.

On Fox, Rosewood and Pitch each held with a 0.7 rating among adults 18-49. The CW was also even, with Legends of Tomorrow fetching a 0.6 rating in the key demo and Supernatural earning a 0.7 rating.